PC-BSD 9.0 Release

PuceBaboon writes "It's worth noting that, in addition to the main FreeBSD release covered here recently, PC-BSD has also released their 'Isotope' edition, based on FreeBSD 9.0. Why would you be interested? Well, PC-BSD, while not the first, is certainly the most current version of FreeBSD aimed squarely at the desktop user. Pre-configured for the desktop and using a graphical installer, the 9.0 release includes KDE, GNOME, XFCE and LXDE desktop environments, an update manager, WiFi 'quick connect,' BootCamp support and auto-configuration for most common hardware. Live-CD, VirtualBox and VMware release images for 32- and 64-bit architectures also make it easier than ever for users to test the release before committing to a full install. Check out the torrents (scroll down), main download page and the PC-BSD 9.0 manual pages."

Comments

2012 is Truly The Year

[Anonymous Coward]

This is truly the year of the BSD desktop!

Just out of curiosity

[rsilvergun]

any fans can tell me why I'd want to run this instead of a Linux flavor?

Re:Just out of curiosity

[bleedingsamurai]

I wouldn't classify myself as solely a BSD fan, if it is Unix I'm fairly happy. But the short answer is BSD was/is Unix hackers porting Unix to the PC platform while GNU/Linux tends to be PC hackers porting Unix to the PC platform. There isn't as much hardware support in BSD but with BSD you tend to have much more rock solid code. Another attractive thing is that the entire source is developed and maintained in one branch by one community. (in some ways this is also a bad thing) Unless you get into the nitty gritty of implementation and design structure, you won't really feel a huge difference though.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

"When will the year of the BSD desktop be?"

    When FreeBSD gets their heads out of their collective ass and realize their operating system isn't single purpose. Until then, it'll be just limping along and so will any derivative based on it. (Coming from a long time FreeBSD user)

Re:Just out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, wait now... is the code more rock solid /because/ there is less hardware support?

Or perhaps you could give some examples of GNU/Linux code that is 'soft' while doing the same thing that BSD does 'solid'?

I do like your simple summary, it's just that it can conceal as much as it reveals. So it sounds like you've helped me understand the difference until I thought about it a bit. Would you flesh it out some, pls?

Re:Just out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

Two years after the year of the Linux desktop. Count on it.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[belmolis]

Given what you've said about who is doing the porting, I wonder if there is a difference in the extent to which Unix ways of doing things are preserved. As a hard-core Unix person who prefers the command-line for most things, I am sometimes frustrated by the extent to which GNU/Linux has come to cater to people coming from MS Windows in doing more and more with the GUI and and moving away from the Unix way of doing things. Probably the worst thing is the way programs with a GUI do not pay attention to the working directory. I wonder if PC-BSD would be more to the liking of people like me?

Re:Just out of curiosity

[wagnerrp]

You've got the original BSD4.3, which spawned FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and more recently DragonFly BSD. Then you've got various offshoots like NanoBSD, FreeNAS, pfSense, DesktopBSD, GhostBSD, and a number of other stalled projects. I like BSD. I've got it running on my firewall and home server. I just don't see where this singular community you speak of is.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[semi-extrinsic]

This. An example of where GNU/Linux is "softer" would be very much appreciated. Perhaps the fact that the NSA had to make SELinux in the first place will do? (I am not an expert on this, pure speculation.)

Re:Just out of curiosity

[unixisc]

Yeah, the same way one can fork Linux, one can fork any of the above BSDs, and run w/ it. If you don't like how something is, you can change it, just like you can w/ Linux. Just b'cos you don't get to influence the direction of FreeBSD, or OpenBSD or any of the others doesn't mean you can't do it yourself.

Back to the GP's question, people on Ubuntu who've been turned off by recent messing around w/ the desktop environment - particularly Gnome 3 & Unity, and who don't like how Kubuntu does it either, can go w/ PC-BSD, which has 9 DEs, as I describe elsewhere in this thread. If one is particularly interested in Gnome, one can go to GhostBSD. Also, there are specialized distros for routers, like pfSense.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[TheRaven64]

One big thing you will notice is that the BSD teams are a bit less deprecation-happy than Linux developers. Over in Linux land, components seem to have two states: unfinished and deprecated. BSDs tend not to replace things that work, tend to favour incremental improvements over complete rewrites, and care a lot about interface stability. Most of the administrative stuff I learned when I first used FreeBSD a decade ago is still valid now - the implementations have changed a lot, but the tools still appear to act the same way. They also put a lot of effort into maintaining binary compatibility for the core system.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[adolf]

I wonder the same thing.

I found myself with a Windows desktop a few years back, after more than a decade or so of Linux and an enjoyable stint with OS/2 before that.

I've always (well, ever since I was a kid) kept a *nix box around, whether as my primary machine or just for file-serving and all of the (big and small) things that it does well, but haven't plugged a monitor into my current Linux box in a coon's age: Last time I tried Ubuntu, I got really sick of its irrevocable click-to-focus (which is just not how X is supposed to be) and its bastardized incarnation of xscreensaver. And lately, with Unity, I just don't care about Ubuntu anymore -- I used to recommend it to people who might be less picky than I am, but that doesn't happen anymore now that they've jumped ship.

And at the pedantic end of things, I recently gave up on making PHP work with Apache on Gentoo: I just wanted to do a little bit of web development for a simple application, and found myself spending way, way, way too much time failing to make inline PHP work. (I had it working well several years ago on a very different installation and it was easy, but then those Gentoo fuckers went and changed everything while apparently neglecting to document...anything, really. I'd document and publish the process myself if I could make it work, but that's not going to happen now.)

Am currently installing PC-BSD 9 on ZFS. The installer has been slick, so far, with simple and reasonable choices to select from, and with Knoppix-like magic in hardware detection. It is taking forever, but then I seem to recall every BSD install I've ever done taking forever as well...and the box itself isn't particularly fast by today's measures (Athlon XP 1800, 1.5g RAM). (I strongly suspect it will get faster with a bit of ZFS tweaking and maybe a lighter kernel.)

I'm doing this partly to play with a good ZFS implementation that uses neither Solaris nor FUSE, partly because of my current frustration with Gentoo and PHP, and partly because I've had great experience with FreeBSD (off and on) for almost two decades between my own installs, and various shell accounts elsewhere. And I just want to see what the old girl's up to lately.

(When the singular hard drive crashed on my last FreeBSD machine (4.0-CURRENT?), it stayed alive and kept routing packets flawlessly for -months- until I had time to goof with it. I hang the scarred and grooved platters on the wall in remembrance of it.)

Re:Just out of curiosity

[hairyfeet]

What's the support like? How many years will this be updated without having to wipe and reinstall? One thing that drives me mad about Linux is you are supposed to wipe and reinstall every 6 damned months or plan your life around LTS releases which as a retailer is right out. Despite all the "Linux is ready for the desktop" BS the support situation is quite bad. Corporations may throw out their desktops every 3 years so they are always under hardware support but home users? Keep a system for an average of 6-8 years before it is finally tossed or given away.

So how many years does this version get for support? Can it do an in place upgrade using GUI ONLY without puking on its own drivers and dying hard which is what Linux seems to do anymore? I thought for sure when I started messing with Linux in 04 my shelves would have Linux boxes right next to the Windows machines by 2010 tops but the whole mess with PulseAudio and the DEs getting trashed means it'll probably be 5 years before anything is really stable back in Linux land again, so how is PC-BSD? Does it work on laptops? How is its wireless support? I have limited bandwidth here so I hate to give it my "Is it safe" test and waste 20Gb+ if it is simply gonna puke. "IS it safe" simulates what would happen to a customer who bought the machine from me and kept it for 3 years by taking the version from 3 years ago and updating/upgrading it to current. What are the odds BSD will pass? Good, poor? Remember that home users do NOT buy support contracts and they are not gonna pay more than Windows for a strange OS so once it leaves the shop it has to KEEP running with minimal user skill.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

Uuum about PHP in Apache: Don't blame your own incompetence on others. No idea what you did, but this is how it's done here, and it works without problems:

cat >> /etc/make.conf <<CONF
PHP_TARGETS="php5-3"
PHP_INI_VERSION="development" # Assuming this is your dev box.
APACHE2_MODULES="actions alias auth_basic auth_digest authn_anon authn_dbd authn_dbm authn_default authn_file authz_dbm authz_default authz_groupfile authz_host authz_owner authz_user autoindex cache cgi dav dav_fs dav_lock dbd deflate dir disk_cache env expires ext_filter file_cache filter headers ident imagemap include info log_config logio mem_cache mime mime_magic negotiation proxy proxy_ajp proxy_balancer proxy_connect proxy_http rewrite setenvif so speling status unique_id userdir usertrack vhost_alias" # Well, in my case.
APACHE2_MPMS="worker" # Also in my case.
CONF
# Optionally set the USE flags. Here's the complete set of mine. Yours would have the global ones set in /etc/make.conf obviously.
echo 'dev-lang/php apache2 bzip2 calendar cli crypt ctype curl curlwrappers doc exif fileinfo filter flatfile ftp gd gdbm gmp hash iconv inifile intl ipv6 json kerberos ldap nls pcntl pdo phar pic posix postgres readline session simplexml sockets spell ssl sysvipc threads tidy tokenizer truetype unicode xml xmlreader zip zlib -bcmath -berkdb -cdb -cgi -cjk -debug -embed -enchant -firebird -fpm -frontbase -imap -iodbc -kolab -ldap-sasl -libedit -mhash -mssql -mysql -mysqli -mysqlnd -oci8-instant-client -odbc -qdbm -recode -sharedmem -snmp -soap -sqlite -sqlite3 -suhosin -sybase-ct -wddx -xmlrpc -xmlwriter -xpm -xsl' >> /etc/portage/package.use/www # If package.use is not a directory, change this accordingly.
echo 'www-servers/apache doc ldap ssl threads -debug -selinux -static -suexec' >> /etc/portage/package.use/www # Ditto
emerge -atv www-servers/apache dev-lang/php
sed -i.example 's/APACHE2_OPTS="[^"]*"/APACHE2_OPTS="-D DEFAULT_VHOST -D INFO -D LANGUAGE -D MANUAL -D SSL -D SSL_DEFAULT_VHOST -D SUEXEC -D PHP5 -D USERDIR"/' /etc/conf.d/apache2 # Important. Configure to requirements.
vim /etc/apache2/{modules,vhosts}.d/* # Configure your Apache. At least do the stuff in vhosts.d.
vim /etc/php/apache*-php*/php.ini # Configure your PHP.
/etc/init.d/apache2 start # Voila!

There, was that so hard?

Re:Just out of curiosity

[bleedingsamurai]

That is part of the reason actually.
The GNU/Linux community tends to make quick and dirty hacks to get hardware working that otherwise wouldn't because manufacturers are unwilling to provide specs. And you end up with a lot of hardware support but also some unstable drivers.
While BSD will just simply not support a piece of hardware until they can make a driver that accesses the hardware in a more "normal" way.

A current example can be found in file systems. btrfs is marked stable in the kernel but we don't have an fsck utility, which to me is rather unstable. Typically this is not how BSD would go about releasing a new file system.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[bleedingsamurai]

The documentation is fantastic. I almost never have to ask for help on a forum because of it. The community is smaller, but I have never had a forum post go unanswered.
Not to nitpick, but that release cycle sounds like Ubuntu specifically not GNU/Linux as a whole. Now if you don't mind getting a little nerdy there are lots of other GNU/Linux distros out there, with much nicer release cycles. You might feel more at home with Debian.

I couldn't answer about doing a GUI only upgrade, I know there are GUI package managers and I would assume with PC-BSD that would be preinstalled but I never used them. However, since BSD is one group of developers building essentially the same code base, upgrading from a major release to the next isn't nearly as traumatic as Ubuntu, since everything is essentially linked against the same libraries that are being updated.
As for hardware support, I don't know exactly what you have, but there is a big old list of supported hardware:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.0R/hardware.html

Re:Just out of curiosity

[hairyfeet]

What I need is a machine that can walk out of my shop with a free OS and will STILL be running in 7 years WITH updates. Can BSD do that? The average lifetime for a PC in this area is 7 years so THAT is what I'm looking for, the "great XP dieoff" is already under way and the offlease office machines are starting to pile up. If I could buy Win 7 Starter OEM I wouldn't even be asking but I can't find a source that will sell me that at less than 10,000 units so that's right out, and Win 7 HP costs more than the machines are worth. So I need a FOSS OS that will still be functional on a 3.2Ghz P4 with 1gb of RAM in 7 years, so far no Linux has passed muster, hence the question about BSD.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

I run Debian 6 on both physical hardware and VMs that have less resources than you've described, and it works perfectly fine. For desktop environments, I use either plain Gnome or XFCE. For the VMs, I access their desktops by running FreeNX, and on both my LAN and over the Internet it's almost as fast as a native desktop. These machines are routinely used for web browsing, email, and office documents.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

Am currently installing PC-BSD 9 on ZFS. The installer has been slick, so far, with simple and reasonable choices to select from, and with Knoppix-like magic in hardware detection. It is taking forever, but then I seem to recall every BSD install I've ever done taking forever as well...and the box itself isn't particularly fast by today's measures (Athlon XP 1800, 1.5g RAM). (I strongly suspect it will get faster with a bit of ZFS tweaking and maybe a lighter kernel.)

You might want to rethink that filesystem choice. I would recommend 64-bit CPU and 4GB RAM minimum.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[DannyO152]

My FreeBSD box has to be seven or more years old. It's gone from one of the 5's through 9.0 without a reinstall. I don't use it 24/7 (but I have). Its primary purpose is to be my cvs code repository. To tech-date the system, subversion was just emerging, hence, cvs. Probably should go git.

I did use a FreeBSD system for a desktop, but this was for a year and a half around 2001. I got an iBook in September 2001, but I had already left the Windows fold for my home computing, so the desktop went FreeBSD. I do prefer OS X because of the gui integration. For a small business where I was the de facto IT guy, I used FreeBSD/squid for a web proxy and solved some huge problems with an ancient Windows SMB server at zero cost: I had used an off lease machine that was constitutionally unsuited for the business's CAD work.

Documentation for BSDs is great. I was considering a wipe and reinstall, as the path of least resistance, as I went from 8.2 to 9 yesterday, but I ate my veggies, built character, and went and looked up the step I had forgotten from the last time a version upgrade occurred. An up to date manual for FreeBSD is available at www.freebsd.org. It also is downloadable as part of the system sources and the local version is kept in sync via cvsup/make. At the site, you might find the release engineering, errata, and security update histories illuminating.

PC-BSD has some interesting ideas and I do run it virtually. It has had application sandboxing for a while, which is something I see the popular, consumer oses implementing. The project is also working on the package dependency issue and I like the way they are thinking. So, while PC-BSD is relatively new, the project keeps its kernel and userland synchronized tightly with FreeBSD. They got good folks there and I expect that its stability should be good, though not as good as FreeBSD, because of the concerns with third-party windowing parties.

Now, as I look at your summary of your problem, I'm not sure that it quite makes sense as a general question for guidance. The computers that are off-lease have to be 2 or 3 years old. You don't need seven more years from them. If you could, you'd have put Windows 7 on them. Well, PC-BSD is no more a substitute for Windows than Windows is a substitute for PC-BSD. (Yes, that's right, if one has set up a productive Unix-like environment, then Windows is a degraded experience, with quite a few "You can't get there from here." issues.) I hope this isn't a case when someone sets up a problem in order to have others offer suggestions that are swatted down, because the constraints are such that it has moved out of the power spot of the technology being discussed. Besides, the applications are far more important than the underlying os in terms of box longevity. If the cost of wiping and reinstalling saves thousands of dollars in licensing fees, well?

Any way, to summarize, you need seven more years of Windows or Windows-substitue usage from your computers and Windows 7 is too expensive, there's only to be one more wipe and reinstall, Linux doesn't help you out, and the BSDs, with their windowing systems being orthogonal to the kernel development, though very stable, may not support the applications and processor that you want to keep using. Then, I wish you good luck, because I don't think any one else other than you is trying to solve your precise problem.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[theArtificial]

Am currently installing PC-BSD 9 on ZFS. The installer has been slick, so far, with simple and reasonable choices to select from, and with Knoppix-like magic in hardware detection. It is taking forever, but then I seem to recall every BSD install I've ever done taking forever as well...and the box itself isn't particularly fast by today's measures (Athlon XP 1800, 1.5g RAM). (I strongly suspect it will get faster with a bit of ZFS tweaking and maybe a lighter kernel.)

A good rule to follow with ZFS is 2GB RAM for every 1TB in the pool. More information here

Re:Just out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this the same FreeBSD that requres a recompile of the base system when a new kernel is used?

With Linux, I've had no trouble upgrading the kernel between 2.4 to 3.0, safe for a handful of utils (udev and modutils come to mind), but these are easily handled.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[TheRaven64]

Is this the same FreeBSD that requres a recompile of the base system when a new kernel is used?

Nope. However, it does require that you recompile the kernel when you install a new base system. The kernel guarantees backwards compatibility with userland stuff, but the userland stuff does not guarantee support for older kernels. This is as it should be, and extends to the rest of the system. For example, libc always (modulo bugs) works with binaries compiled with an older libc, but applications compiled with a newer libc are not guaranteed to work with an older libc.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I forked FreeBSD rather than building a desktop distro on top of it like PC-BSD and DesktopBSD did. Of course, I've had manpower problems so I haven't diverged as much as I wanted to.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[laffer1]

I guess I need to get out the marketing more.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

My email tells me there are some pills you can take for that...

Re:Just out of curiosity

[smash]

Depends how fast you want it. I have VMs running ZFS with 1gb of RAM and it is usable. By no means fast, but if you value data integrity over speed then it will work without 4gb of ram or more.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[BitZtream]

What's the support like? How many years will this be updated without having to wipe and reinstall?

I just upgraded a pair of FreeBSD boxes from 6.0 and 6.2 to 9.0, it was a multistep process that required several manual steps (documented steps mind you) to complete. The upgrade process completed exactly as described in the upgrade instructions though it wasn't just a 'upgrade now' button :)

I used portmaster to rebuild all my ports and everything appears to work perfectly. It is only a couple days old and hasn't had any real load on it since the upgrade though so I won't know for sure until the workday starts tomorrow probably.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[unixisc]

You can order a DVD from FreeBSD Mall and not have to download anything - just see how it works. Since they are currently offering both 8.2 and 9.0, you can get both in DVD form and do an experiment of whether it's smooth to update from the former to the latter w/o re-installing. I'm not sure whether DannyO above used CLI or other utilities while doing those upgrades, so it would be interesting to know whether it can be done, particularly since the experience may vary b/w PC-BSD and FreeBSD. At least for software installations, from what I've read, PBI eliminates the need to go through the CLI, but it was not clear whether PBI is also used to upgrade the OS itself, as opposed to just installing software packages.

On a separate note, I'd be curious as to how the experience varies b/w various FreeBSD distros - PC-BSD, DesktopBSD, GhostBSD and so on.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[hairyfeet]

I'll probably end up having to dump them on the shop down the street that will just put "Win 7 Pirate Edition" and enjoy the extra profits. And yes Virginia I've seen machines MUCH older keep being used, in fact I was nice enough to Frankenstein an off lease office box together for the apt buildings handyman who has always been good about picking up machines that were gonna be tossed by the local college or the office building he also supports. Know how old his PC was that the "new" 2.9Ghz P4 with HT was replacing? 1997, no shit, I swear to God, 1997 and it was STILL running his little bookkeeping software and some card games.

Hell the reason I use "Suzy the checkout girl" as my typical user is because she is based on a real person. The checkout girl at a local minimart said "Hey I heard that you fixed a machine for one of the girls here, could you please look at the one in my car and tell me if you can fix it?" So I go out there and start busting a gut until I see the poor little thing start to cry. i tell her "Hon I'm not laughing at you dear, i'm laughing because I built that machine over a decade ago and never thought I'd see her again!" I then flipped it over and showed her where I had wrote "Frankenputer" in felt marker on the bottom. it was a 1.2Ghz Celeron and that thing had been passed through no less than FOUR families before it ended up coming to her. since she didn't have much money i gave her a deal on a 2.6Ghz P4 with mobo and RAM and just dropped it in old Frankenputer with a spare 200w PSU I had laying around. Last I heard her 3 kids do their school work on it and she is using it to learn basic office skills so hopefully she can move into a night manager position.

So just because it is something You or I would think is junk does NOT mean that a poor working Joe or Jane might not find that machine valuable. I probably go through 30 of my "$100 special" towers for every new build and since i often get them sub $30 and have most of the work automated its quite profitable to refurb them, same as i go through a good dozen "$150 special" laptops for every new one i sell. When you live in a rural state and the economy is a corpse you'd be surprised how many simply can't afford anything nicer. And I'd LIKE to do the same with a FOSS OS because the "great XP dieoff' is underway and XP has just 2 years before DOA, but I HAVE to have something "Suzy the checkout girl" can use, ya know? Why its soo damned hard for FOSS geeks to get it through their head that Suzy can't use Bash, will NEVER get the hang of CLI anything, and that what they consider easy is about as practical to teach Suzy as trying to teach quantum mechanics to third graders? Hell if I didn't actually care about selling quality goods i'd just run pirate like every other damned shop, you'd think FOSS would want to make a product good enough to kill that market as every pirated Windows is a future Windows customer, but since all I ever get is insults I guess they are happy being stuck in last place forever. damned shame though, there is a lot of nice decent working poor that FOSS could actually help if it wasn't all run by elitist who refuse to accept anyone that isn't like them.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[Pigskin-Referee]

Immediately following the Year of Linux on Laptop.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[scharkalvin]

It's a shame that BSD doesn't support as much hw as Linux does considering the fact that the source code to do so is openly available in the Linux kernel. The problem here is the GPL. Using BSD code in GPL'ed software is a non-issue but the inverse is a problem. IMHO this is head up the ass political infighting (thank you RMS).

Re:Just out of curiosity

[scharkalvin]

Sounds like Linux is the same way.

Re:Just out of curiosity

[adolf]

How slow is "by no means fast"?

Oh my

[symbolset]

It's time to check out BSD for general purposes again, instead of just for security-essential purposes. Yay!

Re:Oh my

[nurb432]

Its "been time" for a while now. I have been running FreeBSD as a desktop for many years.

Now i do admit my hardware is not bleeding edge, and wifi has always been a PITA for laptops.. but its always been usable for more than just the backroom, just not a lot have noticed..

Re:Oh my

[TheRaven64]

FreeBSD is okay on laptops, the current issue if video cards. nVidia still releases blob drivers for FreeBSD, but the latest Intel and AMD drivers rely on things like GEM/TTM/KMS that are Linux-specific. There is currently a FreeBSD Foundation-funded project underway to provide all of the kernel support that the Intel drivers need, but the AMD drivers are going to take a bit longer...

Re:Oh my

[nurb432]

In my case, never had a video problem. It was always wifi. Once they started to support broadcomm using windows drivers it was better, but still a pita to setup and use out in the field.

It is good, but

[certain death]

Like someone up there ^ said, it is fairly uninteresting. I wouldn't go as far as saying "who cares" though. I used version 8.x and it was pretty decent and stable, it didn't have support for Intel video cards, maybe that is fixed.

Re:It is good, but

[hedwards]

I'm not sure it's really any less interesting than the Linux kernel going into a new version or OSX or Windows or whatever.

They've had support for Intel video cards forever, it's a shame though that Intel video cards have sucked since forever. I assume you mean for whatever particular Intel GPU you're using. I think the last decent Intel video card I had had a whopping 2mb of video RAM.

Re:It is good, but

[certain death]

Yep, I wouldn't argue with you on the Intel Video Card point...they do suck, as do the GPUs. I guess by support I meant that you can install it without having to pass something to the kernel at boot before you can run the installation, or fiddle with it to get it to work. Reference - http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Laptops#Laptops_with_Built-In_Intel_Video_Chip

Re:It is good, but

[Anonymous Coward]

I run an experimental pre-9.0 release on my laptop that supports my Intel card. I'm hoping to see a patchset soon against 9.0 though.

Re:Full review

[Anonymous Coward]

DON'T CLICK

parent linked video of SELFMUTILATing PENISES

Re:Full review

[BKX]

Fuck fuck fuck. I accidentally modded this funny. Undoing now.

Actually...

[MrEricSir]

Considering how many Macbooks I've seen at coffee shops lately, that might not be far off.

Re:Actually...

[Per Wigren]

In MacOS X, [a subset of] BSD is just one of several subsystems running on top of the Mach microkernel, providing some core stuff like filesystems and the TCP/IP stack. They also use parts of the BSD userland. They don't use BSD for things like hardware drivers and device handling for example. The Mac-BSD-relation status is "it's complicated". It's way too different to be able to say that it's "based on" BSD, or even part of the family tree line. It's more like the friendly neighbor who let you borrow their stuff.

Re:Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably more like - Mac OS X is homer simpson where FreeBSD is Ned Flanders.

Re:Actually...

[Galactic Dominator]

Yes, I've often heard as much but this assertion has never come with any evidence. For anyone who forms their beliefs based off evidence, here is some as it pertains to the topic:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-advocacy/2008-August/003674.html

Re:Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I've often heard as much but this assertion has never come with any evidence. For anyone who forms their beliefs based off evidence, here is some as it pertains to the topic:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-advocacy/2008-August/003674.html

Which is pretty much useless; it's just counting code lines. It tells you nothing about what the code does; code size does not equal importance. With a microkernel like Mach, you expect the userland tools to be bigger than the kernel itself.

Re:Actually...

[Guy Harris]

Which is pretty much useless; it's just counting code lines. It tells you nothing about what the code does; code size does not equal importance. With a microkernel like Mach, you expect the userland tools to be bigger than the kernel itself.

With most operating systems I'd expect userland in general to be bigger than the kernel itself; to what are you referring when you speak of "the userland tools"?.

To some degree stuff that might be done in the kernel in other UN*Xes might be done in userland in Mac OS X, but it's not really a "microkernel" in the sense of "small kernel and most stuff is done in userland servers". Windows NT may be a bit more of that - I think the image activation part of CreateProcess() is mostly or entirely done in csrss rather than in kernel-mode code, unlike most if not all UN*Xes including Mac OS X, where fork() and the exec calls are done in kernel-mode code - but even NT isn't a "microkernel" in that sense (again, the file system and networking up to the transport layer is done in kernel mode).

Re:Actually...

[ByOhTek]

So... Would that make Linux the Comic Book Guy and Windows is Sideshow Bob?

Re:Actually...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Heck no, Windows is obviously Milhouse.

Re:First!

[Anonymous Coward]

HOORAY. The captcha was "excrete" ... think they're hinting at something?

Re:Full review

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody forgot to post anonymously.

The Ubuntu of the *BSD world?

[Gothmolly]

Replace FreeBSD with Debian, and PC-BSD with Ubuntu. Lets hope the PC-BSD people don't get on some wacked out tablet interface failtrain.

Re:The Ubuntu of the *BSD world?

[Demonoid-Penguin]

Replace FreeBSD with Debian,

*cough*.

Replace Ubuntu.

TFTFY

Re:The Ubuntu of the *BSD world?

[unixisc]

As per BSD Magazine, PC-BSD offers GNOME, KDE, LXDE, and XFCE, which are fully supported in PC-BSD, meaning all utilities have been integrated into the desktop environment itself. The other five available desktop managers are Awesome, Enlightenment, IceWM, ScrotWM and WindowMaker. While these are not fully supported within the desktop environment, all the PC-BSD utilities are still available, though one may need to run commands via the Command Line in order to get them running.

I don't agree that it's the Ubuntu - they're offering what's standard, and offering several default 'standards' - in addition to KDE, which is what they originally had. No Unity, no Gnome 3, no MGSE or any of those. The Gnome that they support is 2.3.x and not Gnome 3 - as discussed earlier in the FreeBSD thread yesterday, I don't think Gnome 3 is even supported. Hope that @ some point, Etoille will be there, and that WindowMaker will be fully supported within the desktop environment i.e. one can invoke utilities w/o CLI.

Re:The Ubuntu of the *BSD world?

[TangoMargarine]

"ScrotWM"? I'm going to say that that's right up there with "GSpot Codec Information Appliance" and ask what on Earth these people are thinking when they name these things. Personally, I feel no need to have my software have associations with sexual intercourse and/or genitalia.

Re:The Ubuntu of the *BSD world?

[unixisc]

I have no idea why they chose to offer this DE, instead of, say, a preliminary edition of Etoille.

just one thing I didn't like

[rubycodez]

The special packages it uses are jailed versions, which means I can't use some of the things I want to use from regular freebsd repository. that jailing is a feature pc-bsd has to protect the system from getting clobbered by the user.... maybe most desktop users wouldn't care about those "server" type softwares though.

Re:just one thing I didn't like

[Chemisor]

That's why they call it P(olitically)C(orrect)-BSD

Re:*BSD is dying...

[darthdavid]

But does netcraft confirm it?

Switching to this from Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

I've finally had enough of Apple's vendor lock-in, I think I'll be on this for good.

Re:Switching to this from Mac

[unixisc]

If you're thinking about using a non-Apple PC, and the UI matters to you, there is an OS called PearOS (albeit Ubuntu based, not BSD) where you can enjoy an almost identical user experience of a Mac but on a PC. It's a reverse of running Windows on Macs. It uses Gnome 3.2, but has finetuned it to look like OS-X, instead of the usual Gnome 3.2 interface that one has. Unfortunately, that interface hasn't been brought to PC-BSD - if Gnome 3.2 doesn't work on BSD (which many would consider a plus), then this kind of port cannot be carried out there, at least via this path. Which is a tad disappointing - hope that someone puts that PearOS interface on a BSD.

If however, you specifically want BSD and not Linux, then PC-BSD would be the way to go. Of course, all the DEs are very different from the Mac, although for people who ever used NEXT, WindowMaker would be familiar terretory.

Re:Switching to this from Mac

[WillAdams]

Mac OS X / NextStep are more than just a Dock and graphical appearance:

NeXT niceties:

- Command= in any app to get a definition in Webster.app rocks
- having all of your man pages, the sysadmin refs, and the works of Will Shakespeare and anything else you wish to add in Digital Librarian ensures one can look up what one needs at will.
- Being able to improve the functionality of _any_ app by installing a Service or an app which provides a Service provides a synergy one doesn't get in Mac OS X where it's hit-or-miss whether or no an app supports Services (Cocoa apps do, Carbon and Java apps have to be specially coded)
- having total control over the screen (you can drag off-screen and hide all but one pixel of the vertical menu, one tile of the Dock)
- The vertical menu makes tear-off sub-menus make sense, which allows effortless customization of one's working environment for a given task w/o inscrutable toolbars
- the pop-up menu means that the menu for the current app is always instantly available --- some commands can even become gestural in one's access to them, e.g., ``Punch'' in Altsys Virtuso, right-button-menu click, down a bit and straight over and release

Reasons why I prefer NextStep to Mac OS X:

        - monolithic main menu bar w/ wasted blank space between the menus and the (optional) information / settings menus for Airport &c.
        - verbose Mac-style shortcut descriptions w/ arcane symbols instead of concise NeXT-style shortcuts (in NeXTstep, Save is indicated by ``s'' and Save as by ``S'', no Command symbol (it's assumed---Control only as a modifier is reserved for personal shortcuts / Unix-use), Shift by case)
        - Print, Hide, Services and Quit are no longer top-level menus where they made more sense and were quicker to get at.
        - scroll bars on wrong side (this can't be fixed by theming 'cause Carbon apps are responsible for deciding where scroll bars are placed :( having them on the left means a window is more useful when partially dragged off-screen and results in less-frequent need to resize a window
        - no Webster.app (this has since been addressed w/ 10.4), Digital Librarian / Shakespeare or Oxford's Book of Quotations --- in NeXTstep this meant one was guaranteed to have Command = _not_ used in an app so it'd be available for looking things up in Websters
        - Pantone colour library --- used to be this was licensed w/ the system, now each graphic app which needs it has to pay a license, and one _doesn't_ get them in one's office apps (major negative for adhering to corporate identity programs where such is specced)
        - vertical menu
        - pop-up main menu --- this is wonderfully fast / efficient / elegant. For me, ``Punch'' in Altsys Virtuoso is pretty much a gesture, right-click, down a bit, then straight over and release
        - repositionable sub-menus --- no need for inscrutable button bars, and one can make a given command easy to get to as needed (when doing lots of envelopes I tear off the poste.app Services menu, put it in the bottom left corner, then an envelope is merely a selection, mouse move to bottom left, click, shift right to the print menu (also aligned on the bottom edge for this) click away. (takes longer to say / type than to do)

Re:Switching to this from Mac

[CoolBru]

Not encountered ctrl-cmd-D?

Re:Switching to this from Mac

[unixisc]

On Windows or Mac keyboards, does the 'Windows' or 'Apple' key substitute the Cmd key on Next's?

Re:Switching to this from Mac

[CoolBru]

The 'Apple' key's official name is 'command', so yes.

Re:Switching to this from Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post would be more valid if you would know few facts.

1) Apple is not PC manufacturer. Macintosh is not PC line of personal computers.
2) OS X does not use BSD operating system but XNU operating system
3) PearOS is not Ubuntu-based, it use Linux operating system (Linux aka Linux kernel)
4) While Linux (aka Linux kernel) and BSD (any variant of it, like FreeBSD) are monolithic operating systems, XNU is Server-Client like NT and HURD.

Re:Switching to this from Mac

[unixisc]

1. Yes & No. Macintosh as a standard was different from PCs - being based on first the 68k series, and later the PowerPC series of microprocessors. That's no longer true today: Macs are a subset of PCs: Apple takes some PC components, puts them together and and defines a closed system based on that. It helps them remain as reliable as prevously, w/o risking drivers not working or other snafus due to any unauthorized hardware being added or used
2. Nowhere did I claim that OS-X is BSD based. However, OS-X does use BSD userland, while PearOS uses Linux userland. That's something the GP would have had to look out for if using any OS-X CLI scripts or commands. The kernel itself is somewhat irrelevant, but the userland is what makes the big difference. OS-X uses FreeBSD userland, while PearOS uses Ubuntu userland.
3. Ununtu is built on Debian which is a huge userland plus various choices of kernels, including Linux. PearOS is built on Ubuntu. In other words, anything written for Ubuntu is almost certain to work w/ PearOS.
4. XNU may be server-client, but that's not what makes the difference b/w either XNU and FreeBSD, or XNU and PearOS. It's a question of the API that various apps see, and for them, FreeBSD would look very similar to XNU, unless the program in question is a driver or something that needs to access the kernel

A nice KDE implementation, but...

[KorrodeAU]

...SimplyMEPIS (v11) is overall better (albeit the KDE version is older) for joe-average user, due to better hardware support under Linux amongst other things. Stability of Debian with a polished KDE setup; what can PC-BSD offer that it can't? (...and before anyone screams 'fanboi', i'm not from the Mepis community, I run ArchLinux myself, but i've found Mepis to be great for my novice-user family members and friends)

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[rubycodez]

Some advantages of PC-BSD over GNU/Linux

a. a lot of new devices are supported in 3.x kernels, Debian will get there someday
b. zfs (and even regular bsd ufs is more robust than Linux's ext3 and 4
c. choice of desktop manager, not just KDE
d. better documentation
e. developers work on a distribution rather than just a kernel with ad-hoc add-ons

(if my employer didn't require me to do certain task, I would run BSD desktop as main machine)

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[rubycodez]

heh, meant to say over Debian based distros without newer kernels

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[ThorGod]

Yeah, I'm glad you pointed all of those out.

In my experience, the pc-bsd installer is miles above the freebsd installer. (This is pre-bsdinstaller.) You can install root onto a zfs tank easily with the pc-bsd installer, and you can't as easily under the last freebsd installer I last used.

In any event, I appreciate PC-BSD. It's not a distribution in the mildly awkward Linux sense. It's more of a logical extension of FreeBSD than a drastic redesign. For a unix workstation, it's probably a good choice.

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[Demonoid-Penguin]

Debian will get there someday

Are you from the past?

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[Amiralul]

c. choice of desktop manager, not just KDE

Wait, what?

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[unixisc]

Any idea whether the Debian guys are doing a kFreeBSD based on FreeBSD 9? Their version will be different in that all the Debian userland programs will come there. If so, this would be a good product, if implemented successfully.

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The answer is obviously yes, http://packages.qa.debian.org/k/kfreebsd-9.html

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[KorrodeAU]

a. Mepis, although not running a 3.x kernel, does run a 2.6.36 kernel (as opposed to Debian 6.0's 2.6.32 kernel), so that's something at least.
b. I guess, but for normal desktop use is there really much to gain? These are 'desktop' distros/respins we're talking about here. I run ext4 on my main workstation and am happy.
c. Mepis also has this, it has everything Debian Stable has, possibly more recent versions of other DE's/WM's in their repo... but both PC-BSD and SimplyMEPIS focus on KDE and do a lot of work to integrate it, so that's the comparison that matters in this case, IMO.
d. I don't have enough knowledge of the extent of Debian/Mepis VS FreeBSD/PC-BSD documentation available, so I guess I'll take your word for it.
e. The Debian developers do MASSIVE amounts of work to integrate the fragmented GNU/Linux components into a cohesive whole. My experiences with both Debian and Mepis show that they've done this job very well, albeit always resulting in software versions being a bit dated at the time of release.

All that said, understand, I don't think PC-BSD is "bad". I booted the live DVD and played around with it for a bit and it seemed pretty great, I just struggled to see noteworthy benefits over Mepis, whereas I can find some examples of hardware/peripherals that have Linux driver support, but not BSD support, AMD/ATi proprietary driver for one, Canon printers for another (last I checked).

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[TheRaven64]

I guess, but for normal desktop use is there really much to gain? These are 'desktop' distros/respins we're talking about here. I run ext4 on my main workstation and am happy.

ZFS is one of those things that you don't really appreciate until you've used it. Creating ZFS filesystems is about as hard as creating new directories, so with ZFS you generally create a lot of filesystems - they're dynamically sized, so the typical downside of this is not there.

Turning on compression or deduplication, or maybe encryption, for a particular filesystem is a single command. If you've got some really important data then you can tell it to store multiple copies on a single disk, so block-level errors are recoverable, not just detectable, even without RAID.

The most useful feature, however, is snapshots. It's trivial to set up a cron job that snapshots a filesystem every day, hour, or whatever. Ever deleted a file by mistake, or had a program error corrupt a document? With automatic snapshots, you can simply mount the old version of the filesystem and restore it. I think GNOME has a GUI for this (Time Slider or something) letting you just move a slider to go back to an earlier state of a filesystem.

It's also great for testing. Not sure if something is safe to run? Clone the filesystem, try it, and then destroy the clone and do it on the live fs. Or, if nothing else will be modifying the filesystem, just snapshot, run it, and roll back if it doesn't work.

On FreeBSD, ZFS integrates nicely with jails (on Solaris, s/jails/zones) so you can run untrusted programs in a jail by just cloning a jail that's set up for test systems and then throwing it away at the end.

Snapshots and clones in ZFS are cheap to create. It stores everything using reference counting and copy-on-write semantics, so all you need to do to create a clone is increment a reference count for a filesystem root. Modifications to either the clone or the original will create new copies of the files (they will anyway, because ZFS supports transactional I/O, so the FS is always in a consistent state).

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[rubycodez]

no, I'm from the present. you know that is based on FreeBSD 8.1 so won't have latest drivers either. Same statement only vaguer if talking about new device support, "Debian kFreeBSD will get their someday, maybe, if the project doesn't totally flop". that Debian frankenstein is not production stable, just a trial balloon. We're talking about Debian GNU/LInux compared to FreeBSD here

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[rubycodez]

was replying to guy mentioning his favorite KDE based distro

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Other "advantages":

It's KDE implementation is completely fucked up. For instance, it sets you up with GDM, and mandantorily pulls in metacity and whole metric ton of other POS gnome software you have no interest in if you're a KDE user. And don't you dare try to clean things up, then the whole shebang will go to hell in a handbasket before you can say "bottle".

I'm sorry PC-BSD, you looked interesting, but you blew it. I'm staying with OpenSuSE.

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[onefriedrice]

was replying to guy mentioning his favorite KDE based distro

But you put it in a list of advantages PC-BSD has over a Linux-based operating system, and it's not one.

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[Guy Harris]

was replying to guy mentioning his favorite KDE based distro

But you put it in a list of advantages PC-BSD has over a Linux-based operating system, and it's not one.

Yes. "Some advantages of PC-BSD over GNU/Linux ... c. choice of desktop manager, not just KDE" is bogus. Mentioning "his favorite KDE based distro", i.e. "Some advantages of PC-BSD over SimplyMEPIS ... c. choice of desktop manager, not just KDE" might have made more sense.

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[devent]

a) If you are not running Debian stable, but Sid or Experimental b) citation needed c) ehh what? d) who cares e) I rather have it that the kernel hackers are hacking together a good kernel and let the distribution put together everything else. That way, the kernel hackers have lot more resources to do their stuff and the distributor can do their stuff.

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[Demonoid-Penguin]

no, I'm from the present. you know that is based on FreeBSD 8.1

No - you really are from the past.

that Debian frankenstein is not production stable, just a trial balloon.

Wrong again. And you don't get to determine what's "production stable" as you clearly don't have a clue what you're talking about.

We're talking about Debian GNU/LInux compared to FreeBSD here

You're talking pure bullshit. Do you even use BSD? (not that anything you say has a shred of credibility).

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[BitZtream]

And you don't get to determine what's "production stable" as you clearly don't have a clue what you're talking about.

Just for reference, neither do you.

Most *BSD fanboy's don't consider Linux production stable, we tend to have higher standards.

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[unixisc]

Are you referring to Mepis or PC-BSD? This is the first time PC-BSD has been offered w/ a choice of DEs, but previously, it was always KDE. So it's hard to believe that if one installs the OS w/ KDE as the default DE, then one will get metacity and all that.

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[Demonoid-Penguin]

Most *BSD fanboy's don't consider Linux production stable, we tend to have higher standards.

Fanbois, unicorns, Santa Claus... different authority dogs, same leg action.

No one said your beloved distro is inferior. You can go back to polishing your fetishes now.

Re:A nice KDE implementation, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm refering to PC-BSD. They totally dropped the ball. Admittedly I just tested the RC, but you'd not want stuff like that in an RC if you weren't going to release it that way, right?

They went from a very nice KDE setup to a batshit insane one, in one release. I guess they got some of those pea-brained totalitarian gnomers onboard.

Just out of curiosity

[sakdoctor]

When will the year of the BSD desktop be?

Re:Full review

[Anonymous Coward]

So THAT'S how CmdrTaco became a nullo.

Not a desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

No serious GL drivers, it's not a serious desktop. Sorry.

Re:Not a desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

No serious GL drivers, it's not a serious desktop. Sorry.

Wrong, what you really meant was no closed source AMD drivers.
Nvidia certainly has driver support for freebsd.

Re:Not a desktop

[TheRaven64]

No recent open source AMD ones either. The recent open source AMD and Intel 'X.org' drivers are so full of Linux kernel dependencies that it's difficult to port them. This is a shame, because a lot of smaller operating systems (e.g. Haiku) base their 3D support off FreeBSD's DRI port. There is currently work underway to support the stuff needed for the Intel drivers, but AMD ones are a bit further away. The nVidia blob drivers are the best supported by FreeBSD.

If anyone at AMD or Intel is reading this: please get your driver team to pay a bit of attention to portability...

Push Button Installer

[unixisc]

From the BSD Magazine description of this feature

Another issue the PBI system is designed to solve is dependency conflict and breakage. Different applications sometimes require different versions of the same dependency. This means that installing one package would may break the functionality of another. In order to avoid this, users would have to use workarounds, which can be daunting to those who don’t know their way around the CLI.

One problem this caused was that each individual PBI had to have all of it’s own libraries and dependencies contained within itself. This caused redundancy and substantially increased the necessary size of the programs as well as runtime memory. PC-BSD 9 has revamped the PBI system to utilize intelligent checks on the back-end of pbi’s via a hash database in order to determine whether the needed libraries and dependencies already exist. This made it possible to avoid the redundancy issue and, consequently, lightened up the programs a great deal. These back-end checks go so far as to recognize when a library is no longer needed due to an uninstall. This creates a lighter PC-BSD with less bloat for the user.

The above surely looks good, and hopefully, enough software exists for this. I'd be happy if the K apps do, and then some, like some video editing programs.

Re:Is it non political?

[Anonymous Coward]

-1, Zionist.

PBI Improvements

[Pricetx]

This looks like a seriously interesting release. My only gripe with PC-BSD before now was the PBI system whereby you would end up with a large number of redundant packages and libraries as everything was duplicated. Now it's probably got to the point where I can start recommending this over Linux Mint (although I do still need to test it for hardware support).

Re:Is it non political?

[unixisc]

I didn't find anything of that sort either on the official FreeBSD or the PC-BSD pages. Link please?

Re:Is it non political?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-bugs/2009-September/036507.html has the original complaint about Taiwan.

Re:Full review

[pulse2600]

um how do the penises mutilate themselves???? forget it I really don't want to know...

Re:Is it non political?

[Anonymous Coward]

-1

I agree with GP - if anybody deserved the -1. it would be you, for a needless anti-Semitic flamebait.

Re:Full review

[Anonymous Coward]

This proves that user id numbers are worthless. AC for life.

eat your own dogfood

[Koutarou]

If PC-BSD is so good, why do I always see FreeBSD committers at technical conferences carrying Macbooks more than any other notebook?

Re:eat your own dogfood

[michaelrmgreen]

Maybe they like the hardware. Why not ask one next time.

Re:eat your own dogfood

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they like the hardware. Why not ask one next time.

As a FreeBSD dev, with a macbook, I can only speak for me, but...

I was going to zap it and put BSD on it and then I opened a shell, and....
guess what.. it was already BSD!

All the BSD man pages. All the basic unix apps.. even the same firewall with all my code in it....
sometimes I would forget which window was on which system..

I will admit, having the native flash support for youtube, and real excel and ppt and
such was 'relaxing' after struggling with Linux and BSD. The main reason was turbotax however :-)

even the macports system is similar.

in the end I kept OS X as my window server but still develop BSD..

disappointed

[xuvetyn]

so is it gonna be any better at hardware detection?